The Island She Disappeared To
She vanished after Froot. Three albums across five years—The Family Jewels in 2010, Electra Heart in 2012, Froot in 2015—and then nothing. Not a hiatus announcement, not a cryptic tweet. Google’s autocomplete started suggesting "is Marina and the Diamonds dead" because that’s genuinely where things stood.
She wasn’t dead. She was apparently in Lefkada.
Lefkada is a Greek island, the one her family originally comes from, and "Orange Trees" is the song she made about it—or about what it gave her, which seems to be the memory of a summer with someone she loved. Acoustic guitars and castanets, lyrics about flowers in your hair and belonging near the sea. It’s warm in a way her earlier work usually wasn’t. Less armor. The video was shot in Mexico by director Sophie Muller and has a sun-saturated quality that matches the mood without being obvious about it.
I’ve been listening to Marina since "I Am Not a Robot" made me pay attention around 2010. Something about that song’s combination of melodic intelligence and slightly clinical self-awareness landed hard. Electra Heart was divisive—some people found the persona mannered, I found it genuinely unsettling in the right way—and Froot was the album where she seemed to have made peace with most things. Then silence.
She’s dropped the "and the Diamonds" now—just Marina—and announced a new album called Love + Fear. Whether she found whatever she was looking for under those orange trees, I don’t know. But the song sounds like someone who stopped performing recovery and actually did some.